India/Pakistan: lowering temperatures

Six weeks after the Mumbai terrorist attacks precipitated a grave new crisis in their mutual relations, the danger of a military conflict breaking out between India and Pakistan has receded. The two "distant neighbours" seem to be heading towards less hostile diplomatic exchanges, but are still wary of being seen to be weak and yielding to pressure. Meanwhile, civil society organisations in both countries have raised their voices in favour of renouncing military options to deal with the crisis, and asked the two governments to "redouble their efforts" to devise an "effective strategy" against terrorism and religious militancy and "quickly compose their differences over ways of dealing with terrorism". A significant change has come about since the Indian government presented a detailed dossier to Pakistan's ambassador in New Delhi on Jan. 6, containing evidence that the attacks were planned and executed by the Pakistan-based extremist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, itself related to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa organisation banned recently by Pakistan following the United Nations Security Council resolution. A day later, the Pakistan government officially admitted for the first time that the sole surviving assailant, Amir Ajmal Kasab, who has been in the custody of the Mumbai police, is a Pakistani national. In the process, however, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani sacked National Security Adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani for confirming Kasab's identity to the media without his authorisation. Until now, the Pakistan government had maintained, in the face of media reports identifying Kasab and his father and verifying their address in a village in the Pakistani Punjab, that there was no proof that Kasab is a Pakistani. "Now that the government has confirmed Kasab's identity as a Pakistani, it is incumbent upon it to investigate how LeT came to play the role that it did, probe into its various official and sub-state connections and swiftly bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks to justice," says Karamat Ali, a Karachi-based social activist and a founder-member of the Pakistan Peace Coalition, an umbrella group set up in 1999. "Indeed, the government must go further and crack down on all jehadi groups with violent and fundamentalist agendas and smash the infrastructure that supports them. These groups have become a menace not just to distant and neighbouring countries, but to Pakistan itself,'' Ali said. ''It is unfortunate that Durrani was sacked at this particular point of time because of internal differences between President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani. But that shouldn't prevent the government from acting seriously against the terrorist groups,'' Ali added. If Pakistan takes some real action, which goes beyond the token house arrests made after JuD was banned, then India is likely to be persuaded to take a more cooperative approach towards Islamabad and work out the steps through which the two governments could work together against extremist groups. India and Pakistan set up a Joint Anti-Terrorism Mechanism in March 2007, and this has met a number of times. But no meeting was convened after the attacks in November. The two countries are also members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which adopted a comprehensive convention against terrorism in 1987, and also fall and followed it up with an additional protocol. This makes it mandatory for the regional governments to share information and investigate and act against terrorist crimes jointly. SAARC includes India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. The absence of cooperation between India and Pakistan after Mumbai is explained by a lack of mutual trust. India claims to have clinching evidence of LeT's involvement in the attacks and suspects that the group was backed covertly by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency or by the army. The evidence collected by India in the dossier includes transcripts of telephone conversations purportedly between the assailants and their handlers in Pakistan during the period Nov. 20 - 29, GPS (global positioning system) and satellite telephone signatures; transcripts of conversations between the attackers and their handlers; photographs of arms with Pakistani markings; use of virtual telephone numbers generated over the Internet; and the associated money trails. On the other hand, Pakistan has been in denial but only of the role played by LeT and other Pakistan-based groups, but also of its own state's responsibility for the security of its neighbourhood. "Mercifully, India and Pakistan have given a break to the sabre-rattling in which they engaged just after the Mumbai attacks," says Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor at the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University here. "This is welcome because any military conflict between the two countries is liable to escalate into a Nuclear Armageddon." But, adds Chenoy: "Neither government has so far fashioned a coherent non-military alternative approach to the crisis. Pakistan is yet to move away decisively from denial and stonewalling to cooperation. And India has been giving out contradictory signals." Thus, a day after India presented the Mumbai dossier to Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused Pakistan of using "terrorism as an instrument of state policy". He charged it with "whipping up war hysteria" and blamed its "fragile" government, including the civilian government, for the neighbourhood's "uncertain security environment": the "more fragile a government, the more it act[s] in an irresponsible fashion". Says political scientist Achin Vanaik: "This runs counter to the logic and rationale of the India-Pakistan peace process launched in 2004. It sits ill with India's considered view that Pakistan's civilian government is friendly towards India and keen to act against terrorists, and must be supported." Singh cited no evidence to prove the Pakistan government's involvement in the attacks. His charges were based on a general assessment, surmise or inference, similar to that drawn by Home Minister P Chidambaram -- namely, "in a crime of this size and scale, I will presume that it was state-assisted until the contrary is proved. I will draw an adverse inference..." Adds Vanaik: "Such inference fits past patterns of 'plausible deniability' in which the ISI diabolically instigated terrorist violence. It may well apply to Mumbai, although other persuasive hypotheses suggest the ISI may only have given logistical support. However, the assessment must be specifically proved in Mumbai's case. '' If India's objective, as Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon put it, is to get Pakistan to further investigate LeT's role in the operation, then it is counterproductive to accuse Pakistan in ways which embarrass even the civilian government. If the goal is to discredit Pakistan, then it is pointless to share the dossier with it. However, the Indian government seems to be relying primarily on the United States to exert pressure on Pakistan to act on India's Mumbai dossier. According to the outgoing U.S. ambassador to India, David Mulford, this dossier was prepared with the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) which is examining the deaths of six U.S. citizens in the Mumbai attack. "When Americans are killed anywhere, we pursue those people and that is what we are up to in Pakistan. We will press ahead and we will do it non-stop, as long as it takes," Mulford said, at a luncheon on Friday organised by the Confederation of Indian Industries. ''The U.S. has been pressing for deeper understanding in Pakistan of the roots of the problem of terrorism, Mulford said. "Like India, we have a common agenda... we want to see Pakistan succeed, not fail, not become a serious problem, not become a failed state. The FBI was reportedly allowed to interrogate Kasab over a number of sessions and has corroborated the intercepts by Indian agencies with its own records. The Indian government expects Washington, and in particular the FBI, to mount pressure on Pakistan to act. "This may not be a wise strategy," argues Vanaik. "The U.S. has its own agendas in South Asia. Imbalance and myopia are integral to U.S. policy towards the region. And there is a huge risk in greater U.S. involvement here. President-elect Barrack Obama plans to intensify the Afghanistan war. This will increase U.S. dependence on the Pakistan army, and downgrade India's anti-terrorist concerns."